Expected to be high on the agenda of the G20
meeting in Seoul this week is the international aid that rich countries
spend on efforts to lift conflict-affected states out of violence,
economic collapse, human and material ruin. While many of the problems
that these states suffer are homegrown, they are often exacerbated by an
ineffective international aid industry that delivers chronically poor
results. Yet there's a promising new approach to transforming the
international aid system now in play -- and the world's greatest recipients of
international aid are already calling for it.

The
counterpoint to the G20 is the g7+ group, established in 2008, which
consists of Afghanistan, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad,
Cote D'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Liberia,
Nepal, the Solomon Islands, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, and
Timor-Leste. The g7+, an independent forum of fragile and
conflict-affected states, seeks to communicate the concerns of the
bottom billion to the top billion. No topic is more important to them
than reforming international aid systems, be it in disaster relief,
peace operations, or development assistance.

According to the World Bank, net official development assistance and aid globally is approximately $130 billion USD/annum. But are we getting good value for our money? The Associated Press reported in 2009 that after ten years of comprehensive aid, Timor-Leste had slipped on all major indicators.
Why is this? A significant amount of aid money, in Timor-Leste and
other aid recipient nations, is in the form of expensive technical
assistance (i.e. western advisers) or goes toward goods and services
purchased outside of the assisted country. As a result, a great deal of
aid money does not ultimately go to the country for which it's been
designated. Instead, the aid agenda should focus on the generation and
equitable distribution of wealth within the targeted country. Successful
countries have successful economies, end of story.

Leaders of
the international community burn through much of its resources trying to
recreate states in their own images. American legal experts, for
example, often seek to build American-style legal systems in countries
that have never had them. But this can take years and eat up scarce aid
money, often to disappointing results.

This fascination with
democracy and governance programming often comes at the expense of the
"missing middle," the underdeveloped working and middle classes. They want order,
good infrastructure, basic governments services, and above all economic
prosperity and jobs. Though they are often overlooked by the aid community's
emphasis on top-level reforms and assistance for the poorest of the
poor, the assisted country's fate
will ultimately rest with them. Emerging economies such as Brazil, India, or
Indonesia, for example, have risen on the waves of growing and vibrant
middle classes, driven by small and medium business.

One of the
ways that the international community can best help the missing middle
is by directing its massive aid budgets into local business. Business is
efficient; its winners survive and create jobs. It is also sustainable;
what is more self-sustaining than a profitable, popular enterprise?

In
April of this year, the g7+ held the Dili International Dialogue,
seeking consensus on policy towards international donors. The recipient
states say they are exasperated, as most aid money still follows the old
model. The g7+ plan to take their message to the fourth High Level
Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Seoul in November 2011, and no doubt to
the entire G20. They plan to call for the use of local systems, an end
to policy conditionality, country-driven capacity development, mutual
accountability, and reduced transaction costs.

The G20 is already awakening, if slowly, on the missing middle. It recently launched the first G20 Small and Medium Enterprise Finance Challenge.
It has asked for financing models to best harnass the economic power of
the missing middle. The G20 Finance Challenge has already pinpointed
one of the most pressing challenges to economic growth in g7+ states:
the lack of access to credit.

The micro-finance sector is an over-extended market, and has so far struggled to assist micro-enterprises
that are robust enough to make much of a difference. On the other end of
the spectrum, large borrowers are undesirable because they are often
foreign and mostly draw their credit through commercial banks. These borrowers are also often part of the problem, being closely allied with exclusive power elites. In
between lies the missing middle, business enterprises whose requirements
are too large for micro-finance but who lack the resources to secure
commercial credit. So what to do? Aid groups could help by establishing a
short-term line of credit service just for small and medium local
businesses. The service would require loan recipients to bid on, win,
and fulfill a contract - for example, perhaps a USAID contract to build a
school. This would level the playing field between smaller local
businesses and larger foreign ones, ensure that more local businesses
can access credit, and enable international aid groups to create local
jobs. The international community would, in effect, be able to spend the development dollar twice. You get a school, but you also get a profitable local business, increased local business capacity, and jobs.

Timor-Leste
President José Ramos-Horta is fond of saying that "aid funds are spent
on Timor-Leste, but not in Timor-Leste". If there is an independent
South Sudan in the near future, and there may well be, will we hear the
South Sudanese President repeat this same line in 2020? It may be too
late to have a major impact on Timor-Leste, but perhaps it is not too
late for South Sudan, or any number of emerging aid crises, to benefit
from a reformed international aid system. Certainly the missing middle
in Juba would welcome it.

Image: Protesters in Seoul, dressed as the world leaders convening nearby for the G20 summit, call for a great focus on alleviating poverty worldwide. By Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images.

About the Author

Edward Rees is senior adviser to Peace Dividend Trust. He previously worked with the Peacekeeping Best Practises Section (PBPS) of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) at the UN Headquarters in New York and as Political Officer to the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy in Timor-Leste.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.